Angeleno Femme

Juxtaposition Of The Day:

The trailer for Undercover Princes, a popular docu-series that’s going to air on TLC at the end of the month:

The trailer for Coming To America with Eddie Murphy:

…….so excited.

El Oh El

Love this “Shouts & Murmurs” piece in this week’s New Yorker by Paul Simms entitled “God’s Blog” — fucking hilarious.

http://www.newyorker.com/humor/2011/08/08/110808sh_shouts_simms

A quick, funny read.

Semi-Coloned Life

“Oh no,” Coco said as she stared at her iPhone.

The rest of us, sprawled across the Las Vegas hotel room in a mixture of pajamas and last night’s makeup, groaned, “What?”

“I texted him a winking smiley face by accident!”

Guffaws erupted from the group. We knew what this meant — Coco had texted a close guy friend about paying him back some money from our previous night of clubbing. But, instead of sending a friendly “:)” at the end of the text, she sent a suspiciously playful “;)” thanks to an accidental key stroke. Suddenly, a platonic exchange of cash owed turned into a lascivious implication of maybe, just maybe, prostitution. 

We all know the winking face is a loaded gun. You do not freely send the wink unless you are ready for more than just “holding hands” or — from my random recent experience — European. Or both. And even then, foreigners seem to understand its sparse use here in the States. One girlfriend told me a story about texting a guy late at night: “He sent me the winking smiley, and I knew it was on.” If “no” means no, and “yes” means yes, “;)” means “how much gas do you have in your tank because I could make the trek if you think you’ll have trouble finding street parking.” You do not wink unless you mean it, unless you are ready to take the plunge into risque implications and transform ordinary into flirtatious remarks with the mere use of a semi-colon. 

I met a guy at a gala recently and exchanged numbers with him even though our introduction occurred while he sloppily poured white wine into a coffee cup. He proceeded to ask me out on numerous dates, but every single text he sent had an emoticon. Couldn’t a sentence just be a sentence? A text just a text? Why did he need to wink after telling me “That’s nice that you get into work at 11am.” Why did telling me to have a good day also conjure up a wink? Or telling me he’s at Border’s? Does he wink in real life? I wanted to text back: “Isn’t your digital eyelid cramping by now?”

But I started ignoring him instead. I couldn’t stand the emoticonsumption. I’d had enough.

A newer beau began to send over small flurries of emoticons, and I was initially distraught: they were the odd, anatomically correct smileys, the kinds with noses. A rare breed that I thought had been abandoned along with AOL. “I had a nice time with you” would be followed by “:-)” and I’d stare at the nose, perplexed. Why is he sending smileys like this, and why is this feeling almost like a deal breaker? I discussed the topic with a girlfriend of mine who quickly butted in:

“Does he use an Android?”

“Yeah actually, he does,” I responded.

“I dealt with that too!”

Apparently when Android users select a cartoon emoticon to text, it gets translated to other phones at faces-with-noses. I breathed a sigh of relief with the knowledge that my date wouldn’t ever intentionally nose me in texts. It was just an error in his technological ways. I accepted his offer of a second date.

I can’t wink very well. Maybe when I’m drunk, I can wink. Just as how I can carry on a great conversation while standing with my feet crossed when I’m drunk, or just as how I can delete any and every chain of questionable texts when I’m drunk. Winking in that case is more a state of mind. Eyelid squishes together and it’s too dark for anyone to care that my face looks contorted in the process. In texts, I’m a better winker. An ex and I emoticon’d our way in and out of our relationship. We coined the “:]” face, which was to be a more sentimental, cuddle/vomit-inducing form of the average smiley. The more parentheses added to a normal smiley or frown face, the more intense the implied emotion. This is how you live in a long distance relationship: through the “alternate symbol” button on your phone’s messaging system.

But there came a point in that relationship when no amount of digital faces could make up for his actual face. After all, we were incredibly limited when it came to communication: our mouths could only look like D or \ or ( or ] in texts to name a few, but mostly it was the fact that our eyes were pigeonholed into mere colons that made me the saddest. I had studied his eyes through glistening sheets of tears, through squinting laughter, I’d found them under furrowed brows, I’d seen them widen at the sight of me on his doorstep during a surprise trip back to Los Angeles, and I’d seen them drift under eyelids as he fell soundly asleep. To try to translate his face onto my text message screen felt like the ultimate emoti-con job. 

After that relationship, I vowed to text less. I realized that nothing could beat a person’s real features, the subtleties in their lips, cheeks, eyes, brows. But old habits still die hard — when asked to dinner by the new beau, I responded with “Sure :)” without real conscious effort. The emoticon rolled off my fingers and the habit chugged along. But later on, over Greek food and hookah, he told me, “You have such expressive eyes.” I asked him what he meant, and he said, “Well you can talk so much shit to a guy with just a glance, but they are mesmerizing, they say so much.” And I finished my dinner, smiling without any parenthetical moments, no alternate symbols to be had.